


At Hogsmeade

by AccioInvisibilityCloak



Category: Nothing Much to Do
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, F/M, including a slight touch of Pedrazar, kisses and snow and fluff galore, mostly Bea/Ben fluff, we'll assume for this fic that Pedro has proven himself worthy again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 12:13:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2228616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AccioInvisibilityCloak/pseuds/AccioInvisibilityCloak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If you’d told her at the beginning of the year that she would be going to Hogsmeade with Ben by Christmas, she’d have laughed in your face... She still can't quite believe it's true."</p><p>A Hogwarts AU inspired by a prompt from trailmix-of-tumblah on Tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Hogsmeade

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this is a ridiculously fluffy Hogwarts AU fic based on the prompt “Team Blessed in Hogsmeade”, which was sent to me by trailmix-of-tumblah. Thank you so much for this prompt, I had so much fun writing this. This is also for lostamongstars8, I hope you’re feeling better and that you enjoy the promised Bea/Ben fluffiness! It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: Ben and Bea go on a date to Hogsmeade, after finally becoming a couple halfway through their 7th year at Hogwarts. (I made it Christmas time because Hogsmeade is more fun when it’s snowy.) I hope you enjoy it! Disclaimer: Everything from the Harry Potter universe belongs to J.K. Rowling, NMTD belongs to the amazing Candle Wasters, and I just borrowed both of them and mashed them together for fun. :)
> 
> Please do not copy/duplicate this work. I've been practicing my Bat-Bogey Hex just for your benefit, reposters.

“I s-s-still say we s-should have snuck off to the nice, w-warm Room of Requirement instead,” Beatrice says through chattering teeth, arms crossed against the cold wind, snow sticking to the top of her knit red hat and melting into her fur-lined winter cloak. It’s another freezing Hogwarts winter, and she hates it.

“We c-could always cast a Bluebell Flame for the walk,” Ben suggests.

“Here, let me,” Bea says quickly, remembering the time in sixth year when Ben almost burned his own eyebrows off trying to learn the spell. Sure, he’s had some practice since then, but Hogsmeade or not, she’d rather her boyfriend stay in one unsinged piece today.

( _Boyfriend_. If you’d told her at the beginning of the year that she would be going to Hogsmeade with Ben by Christmas, she’d have laughed in your face, but now just thinking the word sends a much-needed surge of warmth through her. She still can’t quite believe it’s true.)

With shaking fingers, Bea takes out her wand and enchants a ball of white-hot blue flame to float along before them as they walk, side by side and hand in gloved hand for warmth, which maybe actually isn’t so bad after all.

They’re trudging through the snow along the path to Hogsmeade Village, and Bea would really rather just not. She’s much more in the mood for snogging than snowstorms. But it’s the last Hogsmeade weekend until after the holidays, and their first as a real proper couple, and it turns out that Ben’s sad pouty give-me-my-way face is almost as foolproof as Hero’s, so she really had no choice but to give in. It’s coercion, is what it is.

“Where are we even supposed to go? We’ve been to Hogsmeade about a million times in the last six years, we’ve seen everything!” Bea had protested this morning at breakfast, steadfastly ignoring Hero smirking triumphantly at them across the table. Bea wished, not for the first time, that the school had never abolished the rule of sitting by House at mealtimes. During the Sorting and other school ceremonies she could have avoided Hero’s smirks, but not today, much to the sixth-year Hufflepuff’s evident delight.

Their friends have been insufferable ever since the fiasco two weeks ago with the love letters. Every last one of them is being unbearably smug about the whole thing. After Bea’s complaint about Hogsmeade this morning, for example, Hero had smiled a little too cheerily and said, “Oh, _I_ know! Bea, you’ve never been to Madam Puddifoot’s before, _have_ you? Maybe you two should go there!”

And when Bea and Ben answered only with matching looks of horror, she’d pretended not to notice and gone back to her toast with a wink at her cousin.

Bea glances over at Ben now, who she’s strangely pleased to discover is already quietly looking back at her, a small smile on his face. “How many snarky comments from the Love Gods this time, d’you reckon?” she asks, and they laugh. Privately, though, Bea is a little nervous. This is the first really in-public date they’ve had, and people are going to notice that things have changed between them. She really doesn’t want to deal with comments about how much they both hate relationships, because people are allowed to change! If they get so much as one inane comment…

She forgets every thought as they reach the village, which looks like a picture in a storybook, little houses and shops dusted with snow and lights glowing softly in each window to illuminate the stormy afternoon. Bea hasn’t been to Hogsmeade in winter in ages, and she kind of forgot how beautiful it is.

And in fact, once they’re ensconced in a little corner booth in the Three Broomsticks, with warm food and butterbeer to revive them after the frosty walk, Beatrice’s worries are the last thing on her mind. Whenever she gets to spend time with Benedick, she realizes anew how much she genuinely likes talking to him. He makes her forget that there’s anyone else in the room at all, even when that room is in a crowded pub. They’re debating the merits of tinsel. Ben thinks it’s rather pretty, while Beatrice hates how it never stays on the Christmas tree and never goes on evenly. It always seems to end up in a silvery clump somewhere. It’s a friendly argument, one without anger, without tension, and that feels really nice, like old times again- better than old times. She steals some of his chips, and he threatens to give her a box full of nothing but tinsel for Christmas, and they laugh some more.

As they’re leaving the Three Broomsticks a while later, they run into Ursula, Meg, and Hero, who have decided to make this a girls’ day. Bea is glad for them. They need some fun after everything that’s happened in the past few months. Hero is carrying a huge Honeydukes bag full of baking supplies (she’s making her famous chocolate chip cookies for the Duke family Christmas party this year), which gives Bea and Ben the idea to go over to the candy shop and find something sweet for dessert.

They enter into the sugary warm air of the shop, which is just across the way but still far enough to make them shiver a little with the cold on the short walk. Browsing through the Acid Pops and Fizzing Whizbees and Cockroach Clusters, Bea looks up to find that her date seems to have wandered off.

She finds him at the front counter, where he hands her a white and gold Honeydukes bag with something inside. She opens it. “Hero says your favorite sweet is chocolate salad?” he explains with some confusion. “So I just got you a little bit of everything.”

The tin is an assortment of different candies, the best chocolate salad Bea has ever seen. Ben has somehow even managed to get them to magic a few of the candies into salad shapes. The truffles are tomatoes, the peppermint bark cut in the shape of lettuce leaves. This is the weirdest and most adorable thing anyone has ever done for her, and she tells him so.

“Wait, what are these?” She points to a few crescent shaped chocolate pieces, and he dares her to try one. She takes a bite-

“Ben, that’s foul!” Bea spits it out into a napkin. “Is… is that chocolate covered mango?”

“Come on, I had to,” he laughs. “Isn’t it awful? I mean, mangoes are great, but they should never be paired with chocolate.”

“Now the whole thing is going to start to taste like mango!” she frowns. “I guess we’d better eat the good ones while we can.” And they go back out into the snow, munching on chocolate frogs and fudge flies from the salad all the while.

Next they run into Pedro and Balthazar, who invite them along to the Wizarding Wireless Network’s tiny studio. Apparently Balth’s cousin is a member of the Bent-Winged Snitches, who are doing a secret Hogsmeade show there as part of their wizarding world tour. So they go along, even though as Ben says, the Snitches are no Fife and the Drums.

The WWN studio is tiny, so there isn’t exactly a dance floor, but when the Snitches break into their cover of the Weird Sisters’ old love song “Magic Works”, Ben pulls Bea into a dance anyway. “Come on, it’ll be fun!” he assures her.

She’s always hated this song, honestly. It makes her think of the Yule Ball back in fourth year, when (and she’s only just admitting to herself that she did this) she had tried to drop several hints to Benedick about who he was going with, and he had said he didn’t want to go at all because if dances were bad, dates were worse, and somehow by the weekend’s close they had decided to hate each other forever. And she still thinks those hints were practically anvil-sized, but what’s important is that they don’t hate each other anymore. Not even close, Bea thinks, swaying there in his arms as the song fills the dim little recording space. She never thought she’d end up slow-dancing with him after all, and it actually feels really nice.

She kisses him, right there in the middle of the Wizarding Wireless studios, and everything and everyone else in the room just falls away, like magic, and they’re only aware of each other and the faint swell of music in the air.

When the song is over, they return to their seats in the corner of the room. Nearby, Balthy and Pedro have been whispering to each other all night in their own little spot. The next time a slow song comes on, Ben says to Pedro, “You know, I think you should ask someone to dance. This relationship stuff is actually pretty nice.”

Bea shrugs his arm off from where it was wrapped around her shoulders and glares. “This relationship stuff?”

Pedro cuts them off before an argument can begin, by holding out a hand to Balthazar. “Shall we?”

“Oh. _Oh_. Congratulations, then,” Ben calls happily after them as they go to dance. Bea grins. She totally knew it.

After the set is finished, they don’t have much time left until they’re supposed to head back to the castle. Balthazar and Pedro go off somewhere and Bea and Ben are left alone again in the streets of Hogsmeade. The wind is picking up, and they wrap their cloaks and Gryffindor scarves more tightly around themselves. Bea lights another charmed bluebell flame and they follow it along the snowy street.

The cold puts a damper on conversation, and they fall peaceably silent as they trudge along, retracing their footsteps from earlier, giving the silver and pink windows of Madam Puddifoot’s Tearoom a wide berth when they pass by.

On the Hogwarts grounds again, Bea breaks the silence.

“About this morning, I know I was a little bit-”

“Annoying? Compulsively crabby?”

“Resistant,” she says, swatting at his arm, “A bit resistant to the idea, and I just wanted you to know I had a lovely time tonight, and I’m going to drag you with me on every Hogsmeade weekend for the rest of the year now.”

“Apology accepted, love,” he says, grinning mischievously, and she barely registers that he’s taken out his wand and muttered a spell, before a snowball flies into the side of her cloak.

“Oh, you’re gonna regret that, dickface!”

And they’re off, bewitching snow to fall from trees and making snowdrifts solidify to trip each other up, snowballs flying back and forth the entire way back up to the castle. When they get there, they’re both soaking wet and wheezing with laughter, and just before he can duck inside, Beatrice lands one last handful of snow right to the back of Ben’s head.

“Augh, it’s in my robes now, no fair!” he crows, trying to dislodge what hasn’t yet melted.

“You started it!” She’s backing into the castle foyer, doubled over with giggles, so he can’t retaliate.

Of course, he does anyway, and soon she too has snow down the back of her cloak, and then amidst their laughter they hear footsteps in the corridor, so they have to run, breathless, all the way up to the seventh floor.

In the Room of Requirement they nestle together in front of a roaring fire, the room around them an exact replica of the Gryffindor Common Room, except without any annoying first-years or smug-faced friends.

She does love Hogsmeade in winter, that much is true. But Beatrice reflects that this is still her favorite part of the date, just the two of them, hidden away where no one will find them, lost in each other and warm through, even without the fire.

Pity they’ll only have this secret place for another few months until graduation.

It’s her last year of Hogwarts, and it seems like everything is ending, except for the things- snowstorms, relationships, slow, sweet kisses under a garland of mistletoe- that are only just beginning.

And her last thought, before she kisses him back and forgets everything else, is that they’re off to a wonderful start.

**Author's Note:**

> Basically just fluff and snow and nonsense, but I hope you liked this! The events of the play still happened in this AU, but this story opens maybe two weeks after the end of the play’s plot. In Potterverse, the NMTD crowd are Hogwarts students at the same time as the Next Generation kids, roughly. As in, they’re at Hogwarts in 2014, well after the second wizarding war, so I took some liberties with post-HP Hogwarts house seating rules at mealtimes. I just love the image at the end of DH of everyone sitting together, not divided by House, and I hope that continues. Oh, and i have no idea if anyone except Harry Potter characters has ever actually used the word “snogging”, but I liked the alliteration and this is an HP AU, so I’m going with it. Sorry if it felt incongruous or anything. Also, the chocolate salad thing was very partially inspired by the scene in Commentarius where James gives Lily chocolate rice, and you should all read Comm because it is amazing.


End file.
